The massive glacier that formed the Great Lakes is disappearing — and greenhouse gases are to blame for its untimely demise

CHICAGO - From a boardwalk overlooking Chicago's deserted Ohio Street Beach in the throes of winter, it's not hard to imagine the last ice age. A blanket of fresh snow covers the shoreline and pale blue ice glazes over Lake Michigan as far as the eye can see.

But this is nothing. Twenty thousand years ago, Chicago was encased in ice roughly 3,000 feet thick - twice the height of Willis Tower.

All that's left of the colossal ice sheet that sprawled over much of North America and formed the Great Lakes is a kernel of ice in the Canadian Arctic - and it's dwindling fast.

Today, the Barnes Ice Cap, a glacier about the size of Delaware on Baffin Island in Canada, is the last remnant of the mighty Laurentide Ice Sheet. But after 2,000 years of stability, the ice cap is expected to vanish in the